Space: A Novel

by James A. Michener

  Mott insisted that he be placed in the gear, and as soon as he was suspended and allowed to stand against the inclined wall, he understood the mathematical principle. If the wall was inclined 90° to the ground, his entire weight would be held by the cable and he would experience null gravity. If the wall was laid flat on the ground, the cable would carry none of his weight, and he would experience the normal gravity of Earth. At 9.5° off the vertical the geometry was such that he discovered what one-sixth gravity meant.

  In this condition he ran, jumped, bent down, twisted, climbed a ladder, leaped from a height of thirty feet, and fell slowly, comfortably back to the wall, and then, running as best he could in the dreamlike ambience, he marshaled all his strength and leaped right over a twenty-foot fence—an astonishing feat. The experience was so exhilarating that he wanted to remain in the gear long after the experiment ended, and watchers took photographs of this slender man in steel-rimmed glasses, forty-three years old, running like a gooney bird on Wake Island and leaping great fences like Aladdin or Buck Rogers.

  When he submitted his final report, conceding only that there might be malignant viruses, which, however, he felt could be controlled, he was attacked on all sides, but he stubbornly refused to make any concessions: the Moon was approachable, it was not deadly, and men could walk upon it. For three weeks following the release of his conclusions he was required to defend them before scientific bodies, groups of reporters and television cameras, and with every recitation of his findings he became more obdurate in his support of them. He became NASA’s Moon man, and having cleared the way intellectually for the great experiment, he now worked assiduously to make it succeed. All his daylight hours and many of his dinners were devoted to Moon problems, and often it was not till eleven at night that he found time to work on his doctoral thesis, and he would sit hunched over his desk till two or three in the morning, when Rachel made him come to bed.

  As a member of the Moon Committee, Mott was told that five major solutions to the problem of lunar landing had been proposed, and it was impressed upon him that if a landing were to be accomplished by 1969, as Kennedy had promised, a choice among them had to be made quickly and correctly. ‘I can never determine which obligation is the more important,’ one scientist said, ‘speed or accuracy.’

  The five proposals were easy for Mott to grasp, since he had already analyzed four of them in his thesis, but to choose irrevocably among them was difficult, for it meant staking the nation’s reputation and the lives of its astronauts on a process that might prove disastrous. At the first meeting he heard proponents defend each suggestion.

  ‘The first and easiest way is what we call the Jules Verne Approach, since he described it in surprisingly relevant detail back in 1865 in his novel De la terre à la lune, saying that the journey would start not far from Cape Canaveral in Florida, where ours will. His method? Simple. You build one hell of a big cannon, shoot a capsule to the Moon, carry power with you, and when you’re through exploring, shoot yourself back to Canaveral.’

  The speaker, an old hand from the NACA days, assured the committee that the Verne Approach was practical, and reasonably safe, in that the gigantic rocket could let itself down gently on the Moon because the force of gravity there would be only one-sixth of that on Earth, which also meant that the power required to lift the rocket back into space would be only one-sixth the amount required to lift off from the Earth.

  There was one difficulty. The rocket would have to be so big and heavy, if it were to launch from Earth, carry men and equipment to the Moon, and then retain enough power to leave the Moon and return to Earth with heat shields in place, that no rockets then in existence could do the job. A prospective superrocket called Nova might do it, but the experts warned that it could not be operative before 1975, and there went President Kennedy’s promise that we would make the landing before 1970.

  ‘The second way,’ said one of Von Braun’s men, ‘has been studied exhaustively since 1930. It’s called Earthorbit rendezvous and it’s really quite simple. You lob a rocket that we already have into low Earth orbit and let it ride there, carrying the machine that will land on the Moon. Then we send a second rocket aloft, join it with the first, supply the first with all fuel and equipment, and from this stable platform the Moon rocket will fire and be on its way.

  ‘The beauty of this assembling in orbit is that it requires only small rockets, the total weight is less, and the journey to the Moon is made in a small, easily maneuvered machine.’ The difficulty was that rendezvous would be perilous, the joining doubtful, and the successful lift-off from the Moon with a well-worn vehicle extremely problematic. But the Von Braun man insisted that it could be done.

  Now, for the first time, Mott spoke in the meeting. ‘How does Von Braun’s major assistant view these matters? Dieter Kolff?’

  A specialist from Alabama stammered, then confessed: ‘Dr. Kolff supports the first alternative. Use one of his gigantic rockets and blast right to the Moon.’

  ‘Does he think he could provide such a rocket within the next four years?’

  ‘He says he could do it next year.’

  ‘Do you think he could?’

  ‘No. And not in ten years. Dr. Kolff is mad about rockets … big ones … he’s to be forgiven.’

  The third proposal was sponsored by some geniuses from California: ‘Build the lightest possible rocket. But use two in tandem. Rocket One carries the men and their food directly to the Moon. Rocket Two follows with all scientific gear, all the fuel necessary for the return trip. They land within a quarter of a mile of each other …’

  ‘And if Rocket Two lands on the other side of the Moon?’ a scientist asked.

  ‘With inertial guidance, that doesn’t happen.’

  ‘And what is inertial guidance?’

  ‘A modern miracle which you must take on faith … for the present.’

  ‘And the men in Rocket One, must they also take it on faith?’

  ‘That’s how they found their way to the Moon in the first place.’

  This proposal merited the most critical attention, and when the proponents circulated beautiful drawings and cleverly made miniatures of Rocket One, Rocket Two and the Transfer Vehicle that would carry fuel from the latter to the former, the august committee became a group of schoolboys, moving their toys this way and that across their polished table.

  ‘Can a vehicle like this travel on the Moon’s surface?’ an academician asked.

  ‘We think so. The rest would have to be taken on faith.’

  Alternative Four was a most attractive proposal made by a group of private engineers who believed that a manageable rocket, with maximum power and size, should be launched toward the Moon, and when it had exhausted its fuel, a second rocket would overtake it with a monstrous load of fresh fuel, which it would deliver to the first rocket, sending it and its astronauts on their way to the Moon landing and a subsequent return to Earth.

  ‘And what happens to the empty rocket?’ one of the committee asked, and the engineers looked at the great scientist in disbelief.

  ‘It’s in orbit. Absolutely nothing affects it, neither wind nor rust. It just keeps going forever.’

  ‘In orbit about the Earth?’ the scientist asked.

  ‘It no longer has anything to do with Earth. It wanders through the planetary system and remains in orbit about the Sun as a small man-made asteroid.’

  Mott had already studied the weights, fuel requirements and payloads for these four systems, and his knowledge proved valuable when the discussions started. Invariably the proponents of the alternatives challenged his figures, for theirs were always more hopeful, but between them they did agree on parameters, the new word this year, and sensible discussion became possible.

  The fifth proposal was astonishingly different, and as it was being offered, the committee members leaned forward. It was made by an Air Force colonel in his late forties, a real super stick, a true believer, with piercing eyes that darted from one me
mber to the next when his chin thrust forward in that person’s direction, as if he knew he had to convince these brilliant men one by one.

  ‘My plan is simple and daring. Using a relatively small rocket currently available, we will shoot a man and three years of food and oxygen to a flat site on the plain near Copernicus. We’re absolutely certain that he can get there, and land, and survive with equipment and compressed foods we already have.’

  ‘How does he get back?’ Mott asked.

  ‘He doesn’t,’ the colonel said. And when the gasps subsided, he added, ‘Not right now. Not this year. But we have every right to anticipate that within three more years of night-and-day research we will have rockets equal to the task of going to the Moon and rescuing him.’

  ‘Good God!’ one of the scientists snapped. ‘Do you mean you’re willing to risk the life of a human being on a chancy venture like that?’

  ‘I’ve risked my life on lots worse.’ His arrogance offended the scientists, but he continued, ‘I flew to eighty thousand feet when we had rudimentary oxygen systems. At Edwards, I sent men up to a hundred and fifty thousand feet when every component was debatable. To have the honor of being the first man on the Moon, return or not …’

  He paused and looked around the table. ‘To establish the discovery rights of the United States to a surface area bigger than Asia? To go down in the history books of the world? Gentlemen, I could get you twenty test pilots in our services who would take off tomorrow.’

  ‘Even though they would have to wait there three years, alone?’

  ‘They would have a radio. Think of what they would broadcast to the world.’

  ‘And at the end of three years they might hear on their radio that the rescue rockets were not functioning … that there would be no rescue rockets. Would you send one of your men on such a trip, Colonel?’

  ‘I told you, twenty would leap at the chance.’

  ‘Would you?’

  ‘I came here to volunteer.’ He stood very erect, a man not much over five feet six, weighing about one hundred and forty pounds, and as he waited in the silence it became apparent to the committee that they were dealing not only with fascinating proposals, but with a problem of life and death and the history of the world.

  The Moon Committee came down strongly in favor of the Jules Verne Approach: ‘A hell of a big rocket, up, land, and come home.’ When Dieter Kolff in Alabama heard the decision he was overjoyed, because this was what he had been preaching for twenty years, and even though his ardent support of this proposal put him somewhat in opposition to Wernher von Braun, who favored Earth-orbit rendezvous, he was jubilant and assigned his men a score of studies which would enable the tremendous Nova rocket to leave the sheaves of paper on which it had been theoretically planned and become a titanium-and-steel reality.

  But Mott was now working in a world of superintellection, and as soon as a decision of any kind was promulgated it became the subject of intense analysis, with the most tenacious brains in the world snarling at it to expose its weaknesses. This was essential to the process, for Mott’s committee would ultimately spend some $25,000,000,000 to support their decisions, which would merit all the close scrutiny they could get.

  When the debate about straight-up-and-straight-down was at its blazing apex, he happened to visit Chance-Vought, the well-regarded company that had built those remarkable airplanes for the Navy, the F4Us and the F8Us—and the fiasco in between, the F7U—and there he was accosted by a quiet man who had spent his life contemplating the intricate problems of hoisting enormous weights into the air and keeping them there in forward motion. During a memorable night at the edge of a test field this man carefully indoctrinated Mott with the concept that would ultimately save the space program:

  ‘Keep your eye on the simple problems. Solve them, and everything else falls into place. And the greatest problem is this. You have to lift a ridiculous weight into the air to carry enough fuel to get you off the Earth, through space, off the Moon and back to Earth.

  ‘If it’s this weight that’s holding you back, why not get rid of the weight? Yes, that’s exactly what I mean. Get rid of the damned stuff.’

  When Mott asked sardonically which part of the weight the man proposed dispensing with, the part that carried you up or the part that brought you back home—and considering himself rather clever to have posed the question so succinctly—he was surprised by the Vought man’s response:

  ‘I mean all of it. Not just the rocket stages, as we do now. I mean the whole damned bundle except the tiny little chamber in which you ride the last forty miles of the journey. I mean you’re to do on a large scale what you’ve been doing on a small scale at Wallops. Use the first batch of fuel, then throw away the engines that burned it. Let that whole organism fall back into the ocean and sink. Just as we do the Atlas.

  ‘Then use the next batch of fuel, and throw away the engines that burned it. I mean cut them loose completely and let them fall into the ocean. Then throw away all the instruments and electrical gear required so far. And when you land on the Moon, throw away most of the vehicle that got you there. Just leave it on the Moon. And when you get off the Moon and back to your mother craft, throw away the cabin that took you down to the Moon.

  ‘Throw everything away, Mott, and on your return trip to Earth, you throw away even the machinery that brings you home, until at last you’re a thin little man in a very small capsule suspended from a parachute, and when you hit the water you throw away the capsule and the parachute.

  ‘You’re to think of yourself as launching into space in a complex vehicle consisting of eight or nine components weighing thousands of tons, and at the end of your flight you land naked in Mother Ocean, where you started from in the first place. All the rest you’ve thrown away. You have become the spaceship.’

  This became Mott’s operating principle, so that whatever proposal was placed before him was analyzed as to how much of it could be thrown away and how quickly, and it was his application of this great truth that doomed the Jules Verne Approach. ‘But, sirs,’ he argued with the Verne proponents, ‘in your plan you carry an immense machine to the Moon and then you spend all your energy to bring it back to Earth.’

  ‘Is there any other way?’

  ‘Von Braun and his Germans at Huntsville propose a very sensible plan. Assemble the Moon rocket from components lofted into low Earth orbit. No gravity, no strain.’

  One by one, Mott discarded the other alternatives: they were too heavy, too costly, too speculative, or, in the case of the Man-on-the-Moon-and-Let-Him-Rot, too inhumane. The only practical way to reach the Moon, he was convinced, was by the approach devised by Wernher Von Braun, who knew more about rockets than anyone else on Earth.

  Accordingly, when NASA established a new committee to make a hard final decision regarding an actual flight to the Moon—‘And no more fooling around’—Mott led the fight to kill off, once and for all, any further discussion of the Jules Verne Approach. ‘We’ve moved into a new century with new capabilities. Let’s use new techniques.’ And he became such a vigorous exponent of Von Braun’s Earth-orbit rendezvous that committee members started calling him Our Little German.

  He told one of the engineers, ‘You meet only a few men in your lifetime who are geniuses. If you’re smart, you cling to them.’ And the engineer snorted: ‘Von Braun’s no genius. He’s an engineer.’ Mott thought of several sharp retorts, but none seemed likely to be effective, so he said lamely, ‘I suspect it’ll be Von Braun who takes us to the Moon.’

  By dint of much midnight work he qualified for his doctorate that summer, and with his own money he invited his mother-in-law out to Cal Tech to be with the family at the stately ceremony. Mrs. Saltonstall Lindquist noted with approval the quiet dignity of the university, the charm of the olive-girt walks and the grandeur of the faculty club, perhaps the finest in America. ‘It’s better than Harvard’s,’ she admitted grudgingly.

  Because of the stupendous surge in space ventu
res following President Kennedy’s challenge, and particularly because of the inflated NASA budget—well through the first billion dollars, and galloping toward the fourth and fifth— some dozen industrial firms offered Mott choice appointments with salaries that dazzled, but he thought of himself as a government servant engaged in the world’s most exciting decisions, and he rejected them all, except that on the eve of graduation General Funkhauser motored over from his headquarters in Los Angeles with some shrewd observations:

  ‘You haven’t been listening, Stanley. NASA is not going to make anything. It’s going to let everything out to commercial contractors—us, Chance-Vought, Grumman, North American, Douglas, Boeing. We’re the ones who’ll build the space age, not NASA. You join our firm and you’ll build the vehicles that go to the Moon. I am the space age, not Dieter Kolff at Huntsville or your friends at Langley. Join me and you join the first team.’

  And when Mott did stand back and look at what was actually happening, instead of what the neat flow charts said was happening, he saw that General Funkhauser was painfully correct. The long-time airplane companies— Grumman, Douglas, Boeing—were really running the space program while the NASA bigwigs toured the country making speeches and testifying before Congress.

  When Funkhauser offered him $37,000 a year to help Allied Aviation make proper decisions in the space age, Mott felt he had to discuss the tempting opportunity with his wife, and since Mrs. Lindquist was visiting, with her also.

  The women were divided in their counsel. Mrs. Lindquist said, ‘Stanley, you’ve worked like a dog, and what do you have to show for it? A miserable rented house with one bathroom. Unless MIT offers you a full professorship, with a house thrown in, join the company and earn a decent salary.’